The Valeyard
by MEPond
Summary: How the Valeyard came to be, and why he was what he was. Really a good idea to know about "Trial of a Time Lord" before you read this story. Very Timey-Wimey.


_This was just a thing that popped into my head. Wrote it in 2 hours, can you believe it? You need to know at least a little about the history of the Doctor here, specifically about his sixth life. This will echo into the serial titled "Trial of a Time Lord", and close a gap in the Doctor's timeline that the new series has not yet explained. Of course, if they do choose to explain it, this story will become AU, but for now it's not._

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Bartamius Crouch wasn't doing anything unusual that day in 1969. He was headed for a conference on the standardization of potions-brewing equipment, trying to find some way of making recipes easier for everyone in the world to follow.

He was just outside the Ministry's street entrance, having gone to lunch at a nice little Muggle restaurant he liked, when the Time Turner he had in his pocket (which he only used to make sure he was never late back from lunch) started rattling. Surprised and worried, he took it out of his pocket, and just in time. It shook and jittered, getting worse and worse, then started glowing. He threw it just in time to keep his hand from getting blown off when the blasted thing exploded!

He was shocked! That Time Turner was only five years old, even counting relativity! There was no reason for it to have degraded to the point of exploding, especially when it wasn't being used!

He heard voices down the alley, and hoped some Muggle hadn't seen the explosion. Best make sure, so he followed them.

"Doctor, are you all right?"

"Yeah. My head's hard enough."

"Well, it's bleeding everywhere."

"I know. Let's get out of this alley, find somewhere to get cleaned up."

"What was that thing?"

"A weeping angel. Quantum locked organisms. They send you into the past and let you live out your life, then consume the energy of all your unused days. While you're looking at them, they're stone, but the second you look away, the second you even blink, they're on you."

"But how do we get back? They've got the-"

"I know. We'll have to think of something. Oh! I've still got that folder from Sally Sparrow! She said we'd get trapped in 1969!"

"So that means we must have sent her some kind of message?"

"Yeah, and in doing so sent ourselves one. Brilliant!"

As the two young Muggles left the alley for more hospitable environs and to begin work on their puzzle, Bartamius was intrigued by their conversation. Time travel, without a Time Turner, and with _Muggles_ no less? Though it sounded like it had been some kind of time-creature that caused it.

He walked down the alley wondering where they had landed and if there would be any traces of whatever magic had caused this. Then he found it, the bloody spot on the wall, where the man had hit his head. It really was quite a lot of blood, but then head wounds usually bled heavily. Thinking quickly, he took a spare phial out of his robes and pulled his wand out. He pointed at the area and said, "Accio time-traveler blood."

He ended up with a full phial of blood. Looking at it in the dim light, he noticed that there was a bit of a sparkle to it, the blood thrumming with energy. And was it a different color? He just had to experiment with it!

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Bartamius Crouch Sr. could never have anticipated what he ended up with, especially when he broke a new Time Turner into one of the potions to see what the blood's reaction to time would be. A Time Turner contains pure time energy, what time-sensitive peoples had dubbed Artron energy. The blood became charged! And then the fool had run his fingers through his hair, and a single hair landed in the cauldron.

It was enough for a beginning, but this meta-crisis didn't really have enough to work with, so the duplicate that stood up in the cauldron was a child. This child was fully Gallifreyan, there having not been enough human DNA in the hair to change the existing TNA's "mind" about what went where, but there would not be any regenerating for this little life, and he was well aware of it. He had all the Doctor's memories.

But the little spark of TNA he'd been made from hadn't been infused with the Doctor's regeneration energy, just raw time, and it made him wrong. This was not the Doctor, though as he matured, raised by Crouch and his wife as their son, he began to look like him, only blonde. He'd been born without one thing that made the Doctor who he was, no matter the regeneration; his soul.

Then he'd gone to school, amused to play wizards and wands with the other children. He got involved in a group that seemed to have as much a lust for destruction as he did, and joined their cause for his amusement. This Voldemort character seemed so charismatic, not unlike another young European man had been just three decades earlier. He wasn't interested in the rhetoric, but he did have fun with the destruction.

Then came the defeat of Voldemort by a mother's love and a toddler's magic. The mis-made Time Lord thought he had hidden himself well enough in his so-called father's home, but then that blasted Karkaroff spilled on him! Imprisonment in Azkaban would have been horrid for someone with the memories of the Doctor, but he had no soul for them to feed on, nothing for them to get a grip on his mind, and when his poor dear mother sacrificed herself for him, he thought he had his freedom.

Then Bartamius had struck him with the Imperius. That was true imprisonment! For the next decade he walked around like a zombie, but always his mind was lucid, that big Time Lord brain pushing at the psychic bonds of the curse, building defenses against it. Finally his chance came at the World Cup, and he wanted vengeance! He went back to Voldemort, because he knew the entity would be somewhere in the shadows, plotting, and he knew that they could help each other.

He'd played teacher for the year, getting the little boy to walk into their trap. And then it had all come apart again, and they had tried to feed him to the Dementors. He had fed them the images in his head, images of the Time War, and with that he was able to make it look like they'd got him. He knew he needed to get off this planet, and soon. Not only were these wizards too much trouble any more, but he knew that if the Doctor ever found out about him, he'd consider it his duty to "deal" with him.

He'd gotten lucky. He found the Master at a point in his timeline when he still had access to Gallifrey, forced him at knife-point to take him there, even telling him the almost-truth about who he was, and it was then he took a new name. He had a plan. He was going to get a set of regenerations! He was going to live! And he was going to make Voldemort seem like a Boogyman! He would go back to Earth with all the technology he could muster, and he would take the wizarding world by storm, blast them into submission! That was his new vow, his new name. He was the Valeyard!

He still respected time enough to go through that farce of a trial against his sixth incarnation, but the Doctor was hardly the only person in that room he could take them from, and he knew exactly who he was going to take! That was why the Valeyard had been Popplewick. He was going to steal the real Popplewick's regenerations, and he had to get into the Matrix to do so. Hah! They'd all see! He was not going to be a single life in this cosmos! He was going to live! And he was going to rule!


End file.
